1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate in general to positioning systems and, more specifically, to systems and methods for mobile device location verification.
2. Description of the Related Art
A long-standing problem in the art has been fast and accurate determination of indoor location. A variety of hardware and software techniques have been created and, especially in recent years, solutions have been proposed that are both reliable and easy to deploy. Many of these technologies enable everyday devices like smartphones and tablets to determine their indoor position. In fact, technologies like Apple's iBeacon framework are beginning to see large adoption, deployment, and use. As a result, a technology foundation is being laid for an explosion of indoor location-enabled applications.
For a broad class of applications, accurate location information provides context to assist or enhance the user's experience. These include points of interest applications, mapping tools, and social presence sharing applications. While an inaccurate or manipulated location would impact the usefulness of these applications, it would not be harmful from the perspective of the service provider. However, there are many other applications in which the accuracy and trustworthiness of the location is integral to the application itself. These include room access, inventory control, and document access solutions whose decisions to permit or deny access to physical or virtual objects have a contextual dimension that includes the user's physical location.
There has been a significant amount of past research and development that has focused on trusted localization. However, much of this work has explored point solutions. For instance, solutions have been developed to provide anonymous but verifiable location check-ins for location-based services, context-based proofs of co-presence that piggyback on existing infrastructure, and systems for creating and verifying secure proofs of (coarse) location in multi-stakeholder WiFi or cellular environments.
As would be appreciated by those of skill in the art, in addition to the aforesaid technological advances, new and improved systems and methods for immediate or retroactive proofs of indoor location supporting a (tunable) variety of assumptions regarding client-side adversarial behavior and client trust in the location-based service would be desirable.